75 years ago, all hell broke loose in NE

Robert M. Shaw of Worcester, First Unitarian Church chairman of the buildings and grounds committee, holds a photograph of the church from 1938 after it was destroyed by the hurricane of 1938. (T&G Staff/TOM RETTIG)

WORCESTER — 
Harold Johnson remembers a lot about being a happy 7-year-old in Worcester.

The 82-year-old, now living in Port Royal, S.C., was born at the bottom of Bell Hill, and was growing up with his family on the fifth floor of a five-story apartment building at 70 Summer St. He had an older brother, David, a 4-year-old sister, Shirley, and a 3-month-old sister, Donna.

The Bond Bread Co. was next door, and the bakers would often put planks from their railing to the fifth-floor railing and bring over a fresh loaf of broad, Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Johnson, a retiree from the Heald Machine Co. who lived many years in Worcester and Shrewsbury, remembers a lot about those days. He remembers the various ethnic neighborhoods in the city. He had just started second grade at the old Thomas Street School; he said he didn't go to kindergarten because he had trouble with English after growing up in a Finnish-speaking family.

But the sharpest memory of his youth centers around the afternoon of Wednesday, Sept. 21, 1938, when, with little notice, a fast-moving hurricane blasted up the coast, laying waste to vast areas that spanned from Long Island to Maine. In Central Massachusetts, 17 people died, and 166 were injured. The storm took at least 600 lives, and the estimate at the time for the damage done was a staggering $500 million. Even today, on the eve of the 75th anniversary of the storm, it's considered by many to be one of the worst storms to ever hit the area.

Along Summer Street was all concrete and blacktop in those days, except for one house up the street that had a pear tree. High winds felled the tree, Mr. Johnson said. He had been outside playing with his brother, David.

"My brother and I came back and told my mom there were pears all over the ground," Mr. Johnson said. "My mom said, 'well go out and get them.' "

She sent them back out into the storm — that's all most people thought it was — with paper bags. A crowd had gathered around the tree; Mr. Johnson said a hint of the seriousness of the storm came when police came and kicked everybody out of the area.

But as far as most people knew, it was just another bad storm that capped off several days of inundating rain that had sent rivers to flood stage and had already prompted evacuations in Barre Plains and Monson.

"There wasn't any warning for this hurricane," said Stephanie Dunton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton.

Today, there's a massive amount of information and warning for hurricanes; forecasters have many tools, including satellite, radar, and computer modeling, for predicting the speed and track of the huge storms.

"Back then we were going off reports from boats, basically, ships out at sea," Ms. Dunton said. "On Sept. 16 a ship near Puerto Rico reported a storm of hurricane strength, so they issued a hurricane warning for Florida, but instead it started turning and headed north. They had very little data to go on."

Conventional wisdom at the time held that hurricanes moving north would almost always move out to sea, but the 1938 hurricane got caught up in the upper levels of the atmosphere and accelerated, Ms. Dunton said.

In Worcester, Mr. Johnson and his brother were safe back home, and the boys' mother, with infant Donna in her arms, took advantage of the bay window view on the top floor of the building to watch the storm come through.

Mr. Johnson's mother witnessed some of the fiercest recorded winds ever to blow across the area. Ms. Dunton said the Blue Hill observatory recorded sustained winds of 121 miles per hour, with gusts of 186 miles per hour. In Providence, sustained winds of 100 miles per hour peaked with gusts of 125 miles per hour. The storm was moving at an estimated 50 to 60 miles per hour.

"People were holding onto fences," Ms. Dunton said.

As Mr. Johnson's mother watched, the windows in the apartment blew in. She was cut across the forehead by a shard of glass; Mr. Johnson said they thought the blood was coming from the baby.

"My father tried to bandage her," Mr. Johnson said. "It was just a roar."

The hurricane, which does not have a name like the storms are now assigned, is probably the worst hurricane the area has seen, Ms. Dunton said. A strong storm ravaged the area in the times of the Pilgrims, and another strong storm struck the area in 1815, Ms. Dunton said. By today's measures, it would likely be considered a Category 3 storm, she said.

As the storm pushed through, things started happening quickly on Summer Street. And then, in one brief moment, the Johnson family looked up and the roof was gone.

"The lathes were still there," Mr. Johnson said. "But you could see up through it. My dad started panicking like the rest of us. We actually watched. We could see the roof going."

The Johnsons' experience was by no means unique. Up the street at the First Unitarian Church next to the courthouse, the steeple fell back into the church. The roof of Classical High School was ripped off. Several other churches lost their steeples. There were reports of buildings being leveled and people being thrown by the fierce winds.

"Any place you went around the area, it was like a tornado," Mr. Johnson said.

In many ways, it really was like a tornado. Trees were mowed down across the county. In the aftermath, a federal agency was created to manage lumber operations in area forests. For example, A.G. Hunt Co. of Leicester set up a temporary sawmill in Hadwen Park. It took about 10 weeks of 8-hour days to clear the park of downed trees. Around 2.5 billion board-feet of lumber fell down throughout New England, according to one account. The WTAG radio towers in Holden crumpled to the ground.

Ms. Dunton said a study by Risk Management Solutions Corp., a catastrophe modeling firm, plotted out wind strengths and overlaid them with the Fujita scale used to measure tornado strength. They found that the hurricane produced winds that would be considered F1 or F2-level winds in a tornado.

"It's incredible to think a hurricane can do that much damage," she said.

The flooding was more the result of previous rainfall than the storm itself. Ms. Dunton said the hurricane only dropped 3 to 6 inches across Central Massachusetts and Connecticut.

But when that was added to the rain that had already fallen from a weather system that had set up for a few days, the ground was saturated with anywhere from 10 to 17 inches of rain, she said.

As storm surges battered coastal communities, rivers went over their banks in Worcester County. The Ware River overflowed and took with it bridges, factories, and homes. In Barre, residents reportedly relied on carrier pigeons to communicate with nearby communities. In Ware, huge buildings were swept away. Water carved gashes through entire buildings in Southbridge.

The cleanup effort was massive, but was aided by infrastructure already in place as part of the Great Depression-era Works Project Administration.

"Within a week the more superficial damage had been repaired," the Telegram reported on the one-year anniversary of the storm. "Roads had been opened. Houses were being repaired and rehabilitation crews were working in high-gear."

In fact, the same article reported that the new First Unitarian Church, rebuilt after its demise during the 1938 storm, was dedicated just three days before the Sept. 21 anniversary.

Literally without a roof over their heads, the Johnsons moved to a North Street apartment for $20 per month. Mr. Johnson later served in the Marine Corps, and was granted an emergency 10-day leave to make sure his family was safe in the wake of the 1953 tornado that ripped through the city.

"I was in uniform," Mr. Johnson said. "I walked up to Greendale, they had Burncoat Street blocked off. But they let me in, so I walked around. I thought, 'this looks like the hurricane of '38.' "

Ms. Dunton said this hurricane season is turning out to be below average for actual hurricanes, but is about average for named storms. There is a lot more lead time for preparation than residents had in 1938, she said.

"We can definitely see it coming," she said.

What forecasters and meteorologists can't predict is when the next big one will hit the region. Ms. Dunton said that anecdotally, a lot of weather historians are saying New England is due. But it would take quite a direct hit to come close to the devastation wrought by the 1938 hurricane.

"It caused a lot of damage, it was a costly storm, and the storm surge was incredible," Ms Dunton said. "It was a very unique storm."